What the Crap, Ducks Unlimited Denton? (Part 2)

Been a couple of days, no response yet, but I still keep the faith. . .

Mr. Withers,

In regards to the Banquet @ the Knights of Columbus center a couple of nights back. The facebook event page was forwarded to one of my neighbors and it was suggested we contact you directly as the organizer about some of our observations of how your event's guests treated the neighborhood.

I'm actually one of the people who live near the KoC and I was hoping we could have just a friendly conversation.

While I support the conservation aspect of the Ducks Unlimited cause, I'm taken back at how 70+ people parked illegally in the City of Denton Water Tower land to attend the function. How they cut across the field and over the curbs into our neighborhood looking for an easier way out. The couple of hours of duck calls made from people leaving. The one illegally parked car that remained overnight until 4pm the next day before the city red tagged it and somebody eventually came and got it.

But most of all, all the spent beer and snuff cans they left in the field before they took off into the night.

We've had problems with illegal overlflow parking from the KoC in this field before. It's Water Department land, so sometimes the city issues tickets and redtags as warnings if they see it. Sometimes they dont. But usually its limited to 5 or 10 cars who park on the treeline. So it's not been that big of a thing.

Never have we had rows of cars 3/4 of the way to Santos. And never have we had so much litter left behind. Your event set definitely a new record in both regards.

The missuse of and littering on public lands seems like a level of disrespect for the envionment that Ducks Unlimited as a group would be against. But right wrong or indifferent, its obvious that the message was simply lost on more than a few individuals celebrating your cause.

That said, several of us already took trashcans out and picked up all the litter (About 30 +/- beer & snuff cans, along with some other odds and ends). And this years drought has made the ground hard enough to prevent any significant tire rut damage to the field. So thats all good now.

But I got to know, is this going to be a yearly event? Will you be able to take steps next time to address the parking and littering problems? Surely there's some middleground we can find here between your group's fund raising, and our desire to keep our neighborhood safe and clean.

Let me know

Thanx

Christopher

(Original email had a handful of typos, which have been corrected before reposting)

Update 11/18/2011 --
No response was ever received from Mr. Withers or Ducks Unlimited Denton. I expected more from a community organized non-profit. But then again, I also expected that their members wouldn't littered or misused public lands in the first place. Clearly I was stupid twice over.

However, the City of Denton Water Department was not impressed their land was used as a parking lot. After being notified by Code Enforcement, they replaced their gate within 48 hours.

All musings on this website are of my own and do not necessarily represent the thoughts of any employer, my wife, my minnions, the neighbor kids, or anybody else(It is what it is, nothing more, nothing less)